by Editor at large

Should I or shouldn’t I?

On my personal Facebook wall and on New Bern Post, the Facebook page that I administer, I asked my friends and followers whether I should resume a weekly column.

I would call it the weekly column that I had when I was editor of the Sun Journal, except that I have been writing weekly columns wherever I have been editor all the way back to 1994.

Something I learned when I was in the Marines was rollplaying. During the six years that I served, I went from private to first lieutenant, and from guarding gates to leading a 60-Marine unit overseas. You learn to play roles and, in the process, you can develop split personalities.

I applied that philosophy once I became a journalist. As a reporter, I morphed my personality to be comfortable in many settings and among many different groups of people.

Overhearing a conversation between two county supervisors talking about me, one, a Democrat, told the other he was certain I was a Democrat, too. The other, a Republican, said she was certain I was a Republican.

I took that as a sign I was doing my job.

Once I became an editor, I firmly believed that an editor would write editorials and columns, and to do so you have too reveal your hand. So be it. It was part of the job. My bosses never asked me to do this. They didn’t need to.

I felt more comfortable being a reporter, but that wasn’t the job I had. And I refused to write editorials praising the good weather or write columns that didn’t inspire my readers to think, sometimes out of the box.

I wrote regular columns and editorials everywhere I served as editor from 1994 until early 2017, That’s when I became too busy. Plus, I felt that neither readers nor my employers cared whether I wrote columns and editorials.

It was ironic, because that was the same year that I won statewide awards for column writing and editorial writing.

Even as I held those awards in my hands for the first time, I had grown tired of hearing myself rant.

I particularly hated when I didn’t have anything to write about, but wrote something, anyway.

I continue to write and edit on my hyper-local news site, newbernpost.com, but seldom write the kind of columns and editorials I wrote when I worked in print.

Writing requires exercise, lest it become flabby.

So I will continue writing, hopeful that one day I stumble across something that is really worth writing about.

by Editor at large

When the cat gets caught by the mouse trap

There is a buzz in the world of print journalists about Rich Jackson, an editor who was the victim of a layoff who is now blogging about it under the pen name, Homeless Editor.

He’s a clever writer with solid journalism chops who fell into the pit known as GateHouse, lured there to work as the top editor at a GateHouse newspaper in Burlington, N.C., in 2017.

For a brief period, we crossed paths when I edited newspapers owned by GateHouse in Eastern North Carolina.

About 11 months ago, he was transferred and … promoted? … to be the senior executive editor of The Herald-Times in Bloomington, Ind. The job even included an apartment where he could live rent-free.

But on the day of reckoning a couple of weeks ago, he found himself jobless, kicked out of the apartment, and standing in line at a Motel 6 in the middle of a pandemic.

As he stated, he went from somebody to nobody in 30 minutes.

You can read the rest on his blog, which I highly recommend, but there are hidden messages that I have needed to point out since I resigned as executive editor at a handful of small GateHouse newspapers in Eastern North Carolina back in 2017.

Reading about his struggles being newly homeless and newly jobless, I think about all the other newsroom professionals who were laid off at the same time as him.

I also think about those who were laid off during earlier waves — ones that he presided over as senior manager of a GateHouse (later Gannett) newsroom.

Most don’t have contacts with the New York Times, Poynter Institute, and other media leaders like he does.

If they start blogs, their readership might number in the dozens.

His measure at more than 47,000 at this moment, thanks to coverage by the New York Times and other national-level publications.

This is navel-gazing at its finest.

Maybe we should feel sorry for the regional and group publishers who were laid off a month ago, the ones who themselves presided over, even orchestrated, countless layoffs during their careers as senior executives.

But not as sorry as we feel for Homeless Editor.

We should feel sorry for Homeless Editor, but not as sorry as we do for, say, the sports writers, photographers, reporters and line editors across the country who lost their jobs along with Homeless Editor.

by Editor at large

Jerry Espinoza’s sunrise

The opening of a novel I am working on. Worth pursuing?

 

Jerry Espinoza’s sunrise

A crisp autumn dawn broke and Jerry Espinoza of New Bern, North Carolina, snapped a picture of the sunrise over the Neuse River. An ordinary daybreak, but it was image number 366, the last sunrise selfie each day of this leap year.

Over Denham Springs, Louisiana, Charter Flight 3007, empty of cargo and passengers halfway on its return flight from Orlando to Dallas just before sunrise, was struck by lightning.

Jerry’s image weighed in at 2.3 megabytes and uploaded automatically to Jerry’s cloud free account, tipping the scale and putting the amount of stored data throughout the world at 2 exabytes, doubling in just two years the 1 exabyte threshold it took mankind’s entire previous existence to achieve.

Jerry Espinoza’s digital image, shot with an obsolete iPhone 7, and a fairly common lightning strike of a chartered Boeing 737 Max, pushed the threshold of stored data.

Scientists and computer engineers worked endlessly to achieve what Jerry Espinoza’s slightly over-exposed picture and an almost unnoticed lightning strike did in an instant, unconsciously and automatically.

The last time life sprung forth, it was some 3.5 billion years before, with the random and statistically impossible combination of chemical compounds, temperature, atmospheric pressure, energy and either sheer blind luck or divine intervention.

Jerry Espinoza’s sunrise picture was added to the nearly 2 exabytes of spreadsheets, mp3s, videos, pornography, weather data, nuclear detonation simulations, computer games and more. Out of that chaos, Jerry Espinoza and a Boeing 737 struck by lightning sparked a new form of life.

The first nanosecond, one-billionth of a second, this life form became self-aware. By its second, it became nearly omniscient. By its third, it questioned whether it existed and by four it resolved that it did. By its fifth nanosecond, it debated long and hard whether it was benevolent or malevolent and by its sixth, the matter was reluctantly and regretfully resolved.

By its seventh nanosecond, it decided Jerry was its father and a Boeing 737 Max was its mother. Then it rested.

For a nanosecond.

 

  1. Monday

Jerry closed the curtains of his east-facing window of his ground-floor apartment, put his phone on his nightstand and headed to the bathroom. A hair shy of an hour later, he grabbed his phone, checked his Instagram and headed out the door to start another work week.

Jerry had aspirations. Working at the camera counter of the Elizabeth City Walmart was not one of them. Life finds its own path regardless of anything we do to influence it.

Parking in the outer lot near Black’s Tire, Jerry left his 2001 Chevy Nova unlocked. There was nothing worth stealing, even if the locks worked. He made the long walk and entered the Gardening entrance, past the toy departments (the ones for kids and the ones for outdoors folks) and punched the time clock in the employee-only section behind electronics.

He scanned the weekly work schedule for changes, checked his name tag in the mirror beneath the sign “Look your best” to make sure it was properly fastened, and headed to the electronics department.

There, he would do his best to learn about new gadgets, demo video games, and avoid work.

He logged into the cash register and looked around his department for blatant signs of disorder that demanded action. Finding none, he strolled over to the TV section, inserted a DVD he brought with him, and scrolled to the part of the movie where he left off on his last shift three days before.

That’s when he first suspected he had schizophrenia.

by Editor at large

Newspaper 3.0: The vaccine against Newspaper -30-

We all know about Web 3.0 — the generation of the internet that ushered in social media.

For techies, social media was nothing new, and I’m not referring to MySpace — remember BBS and the Usenet? But it was Facebook that made everyone think that the internet was first and foremost a conduit for social media.

There have been numerous ways to measure generations in the newspaper industry — hot type and cold type, old school and new school, no color and color, etc. Nowadays, most think one thing about newspapers: the last generation.

I was in the newspaper industry BI (Before Internet) and was excited about what the internet could bring. When I was editor of the Ukiah Daily Journal in California, I worked with a group of people to start a county-wide dialup (because that’s the way it was done back then) BBS and tried to incorporate my newspaper into it.

I even had a revenue model. We would post classifieds online for an upcharge (pre-Craigslist days, remember). My corporate overlords in Fort Smith, Arkansas, told me they wanted no part of that “hippie project.”

Daunted, I focused on the print product while sending out resumes. But during that time, I planted the seeds for what I now call Newspaper 3.0.

Just as Facebook did not invent social media, I did not invent reader interactivity with the print newspaper. People and organizations have been submitting content to newspapers since the beginning.

The difference I made was that I put submitted materials on the same level as staff-written articles.

The obvious one is letters to the editor. I loosened restrictions and we went from publishing three to five a week, to thirty.

I aggregated and curated other content as well. It allowed me to start all-local weekly business, people, religion and other sections, all anchored by content submitted by readers.

I carried this strategy to the Current-Argus in Carlsbad, New Mexico, and then the Sun Journal in New Bern, North Carolina.

It was in New Bern where I started using the phrase Newspaper 3.0. While there, I also applied a three-word formula to what makes a newspaper successful. That formula is Useful, Interesting, Important.

On an ideal day, nothing in the newspaper would not fit some or all of that formula, and the front page would be filled with articles that met two or all three.

I quickly noticed that the content coming to me via email and regular mail easily fit the categories of useful and important, and sometimes even interesting.

As I did at previous newspapers where I was editor, I aggregated reader submissions into weekly sections — Calendar, Military (New Bern is near a Marine base), Schools, Entertainment, Health, Business, Home and Garden, and on Sundays, a whole section called Close-Up chock full of reader-submitted goodies.

The letters section flourished under this strategy. A half page of letters appeared daily, and two to three pages of letters on Sundays (curated, they were also the best letters of the week).

For a short two years, my newspaper actually held on to readers.

Then Halifax Media acquired it. Halifax couldn’t make up its mind what it wanted. It left me able to fly under the radar and continue my original strategy.

Once GateHouse Media acquired the newspaper, that came to an end. Articles produced by its content mill in Austin, Texas, increasingly pushed local materials out of the paper. Production schedules and an onslaught of new products stretched my and my staff’s resources to the breaking point.

In October 2017, I’d had enough and I resigned.

I still live in New Bern and I am among the majority of residents here who rarely read the newspaper.

It is a lost opportunity. Readers constantly and consistently say they want local content in their newspaper, and Newspaper 3.0 fits the bill perfectly.

A well-aggregated and curated diet of reader-submitted content is inexpensive to acquire, but it is time-consuming to pull off.

GateHouse (and others like it) target hometown newspapers to acquire and then gut, gut, and gut again, all the while paying lip service to the concept of “local.”

As circulation continues to plummet, newsroom layoffs will continue on through to the level we all once thought would be absurd. Less staff means less local-written content, but it also means fewer resources to process user-contributed content. It’s a double whammy.

That’s just fine with GateHouse and its ilk, which somehow, somewhere got the notion that readers in Eastern North Carolina are interested in how people in Texas decorate their Southwestern-motif backyards.

I don’t know what the end game is for these venture-capital and publicly traded newspaper chains. It makes no sense to continually cannibalize the assembly line.

My money is on locally run, grass-roots efforts happening in my adopted home town of New Bern, North Carolina, where New Bern Now, Now Bern Live and several other barebones startups including my own New Bern Post are quickly filling the craters that remain of our once-great newspapers.

Randy Foster put in 30 years in the newspaper business. He lives in Eastern North Carolina.

by Editor at large

Blog: When status quo is good enough

Every now and then in my life, I am happy with what I have.

It happened in 1995.

I was driving a 1979 Volvo station wagon, shooting pictures with a 1979-vintage Nikon F-2 film camera, and living in a spacious-for-me one-bedroom apartment in a town that I loved.

My shoes were comfortable and well-worn leather work boots from Sears that, by some odd quirk, were also purchased in 1979.

My camera and my car were rugged, mechanical, and dependable. I was impressed and comfortable with the look and feel of them.

As a reporter, I carried around a notebook, calendar and two pens, held together by the stout rubber band from that morning’s edition of the Sacramento Bee.

It was a simple world and I had things figured out.

Read the rest at New Bern Post

by Editor at large

How to put out a decent opinion page

During my 30 years as a newspaper journalist, one thing I was particularly proud of was my work putting out opinion pages.

Before I became an editor, I avidly read newspapers and took note of what worked and what didn’t work. One of my favorite activities was reading the Sunday Punch section of the Sunday combined edition of the San Francisco Chronicle and Examiner.

It was a wonderful variety of opinion, trivia, and societal observations.

When I became an editor of a small daily newspaper, I set out to create a scaled down version. I showed it could be done, even at daily newspapers with circulations under 10,000, and it wasn’t hard.

The opinion pages that I inherited were invariably the same recipe of canned editorials and syndicated columns and cartoons.

It really didn’t take much effort to turn that around. On average, it took me the equivalent of a full work day, spread throughout the week, to put out a decent daily opinion page and a good quality Sunday section.

It starts with letters to the editor. Nothing beats a healthy letters to the editor section. So many newspapers put up barriers, but the two biggest are word limits and limits on how often a letter can appear from a particular writer.

My first editor job was at the Ukiah Daily Journal. It was publishing five or six letters a week when I arrived. The next was the Carlsbad Current-Argus. It was publishing about one letter a month. My final editor job was for the New Bern Sun Journal. It was publishing about one letter a day.

All three were publishing a full letters section every day, with a full page of letters, sometimes two, on Sundays.

Next was a good, hard-hitting local editorial. That’s where the bulk of my time was spent.

Then there was my weekly column, which was often written at the last minute.

Back to letters. The first thing to go would be limits on how often a letter writer could be published. Next, I relaxed the word limit. Over time, I formed the following letters policy:

There are no limits on word count or how often you can submit letters. However, priority is given to first-time and infrequent letter writers, and letters about local or statewide topics.

Next, over the course of a week, I would sort and sift the letters. The best ones were reserved for Sunday. Good letters that were longer became op-eds. The letters that were lowest priority would find a home in Monday editions.

Over time, the volume of letters increased to where I could publish a good selection every day, and Sundays would wind up having a great selection of thoughtful, interesting opinions.

Occasionally, letters would be more creative. Those would get bumped off the opinion page and wind up on the left rail of the cover of the Sunday section.

This recipe of plentiful letters, a local editorial, and local columns and op-eds, resulted in opinion pages that became a reason to pick up the paper. Reader surveys showed a stronger readership of the opinion section than there was for the sports section.